I just returned from Moab where I drank from a spring called MATRIMONY SPRINGS not too far from main street up a canyon. It's a wonderful place with water clean from the redrocks.
The place reminded me of the spring that bubbled up by my own home in Island Park, Idaho.
My backyard while growing up:
As a kid in Idaho one of my favorite hangouts was a place called Big Mouth... which was respectively a swamp with delicious green moss that we walked on like it was the carpet of some magical castle. It fed into the creek that ran through a covert under the dirt road we drove down. It bubbled up from the ground like a liquid crystal ball. We put our mouths there and drank from the earth. I thought the water came from the middle of the earth and that it would make you magic.
Here's the creek fed by the spring, fed like me. She is soo pretty.
In the summer we'd catch minnows by putting buckets under the banks of the creek and stomping. We picked wild peppermint to bring home to mom for brewing tea. Wild peppermint and fresh spring water: does it get much better than this. Then we'd head to Box Canyon and pick morell mushrooms from the forest (we called them brain mushrooms.) My dad would fry them on the stove with butter and salt.
What I don't like about the city and the modern environmental movement is that withought realizing it, it makes us fearful of interacting with the earth. It see's humans as the enemy, instead of part of nature. Of course we as humans have polluted the earth, we've abused her, we've misused her resources, we've exploited her. We've been greedy. But our fear of impacting the earth, even on a small scale is unfortunate. I remember this shift while hiking with a friend at Alta in Utah. I picked a wild flower to put in my hair and she told me that doing so was illegal. What? I grew up picking flowers in my backyard. We made perfume out of the flowers with a mason jar of tap water. Yes, it changes the life of that flower forever. I'm afraid our fear to touch the earth: to pick a flower, touch a spider web, has created a sickness. We have lost intimacy with the land.
Perhaps that's why I write about food and try to find the source of the food. I want to find that intimacy with nature again. I think knowing where your food comes from is intimacy with the earth.. feeling the soil that grows the food, knowing the farmer who works the ground to get it to produce. Knowing what side of the hill the goat or cow grazes and what it eats and how it affects the taste of the milk.
That's why I'm passionate to know where my food comes. It's simple, I'm trying to reconnect to the earth which is where we all came from. We've isolated ourselves from it in too may ways.
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